Public keynote lecture: The Mirror Universe - Dimensions of Coastal Dispossession, Environmental Injustice and Moral accountability in South Africa

Anthropological research in South Africa from 2020 to 2024, has revealed significant and diverse human relations with the sea and coast. In this presentation, the interrelated themes of coastal dispossession, environmental injustice and moral accountability emerge in ethnographies of South African coastal cultural heritage. It is found that intergenerational environmental injustices are not easy to foreground, or to publicly respond to in South Africa because the national government has yet to address the legacy of apartheid in the coastal context. Indeed, the coast and sea are now presented in national discourse as economic assets to be leveraged for future monetary gain. By contrast, anthropological research with coastal indigenous and autochthonous communities indicate that the waterways of coastal South Africa are dynamic and intercultural, spiritual domains. These perspectives and relations are increasingly acknowledged in South Africa but do not trump discourses of environmental conservation and the latter’s entanglement in SA ecologies of privilege and power. In this presentation then, there is a call for a decolonial ‘effort’ or ‘move’ to foreground the mirror universe of the coastal context and to acknowledge what it would mean to vernacularise ocean management and thereby seek to achieve environmental ‘justice’. To navigate this potentially complex discussion, I draw on earlier thoughts (Boswell 2014) on what it means, in contexts where there are gross human rights violations, to achieve restorative justice and to consider (even if briefly) whether the existing legal framework in South Africa can in fact respond to the social complexity that the coastal context presents. Bringing these thoughts together, I propose that the coast is a multidimensional site, whose management affects not only living generations, but also the dead.

Keywords: South Africa, Coastal cultural heritage, environmental justice and epistemologies

This public keynote is part of the Workshop Climate change and discourses of moral accountability: Unpacking intergenerational environmental injustices, organised by the CRG Collaboration and contestation in words, and the CRG Trans-species perspectives on African Studies.